Gun advocates bring wave of challenges to state laws, capitalizing on Supreme Court ruling

Boston Globe

01-05-2025

Attorney General Andrea Campbell has
'My office will continue to defend them against any challenge in order to keep our communities and our Commonwealth safe,' Campbell said.
At the center of the issue is what is known as the Bruen decision, the 2022 Supreme Court case that limited how much discretion police chiefs have in requiring an applicant to show cause as to why they need or should have a license to carry. Gun rights advocates say the Supreme Court has made clear the request is an unlawful intrusion on Second Amendment rights, and they say the state has failed since 2022 to change its laws to reflect the ruling of the nation's highest court.
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'They still do not regard the Second Amendment as a civil right,' said Jim Wallace, executive director of the Westborough-based GOAL, or the Gun Owners Action League, which is helping coordinate the campaign. 'The attorney general is aggressively defending blatantly unconstitutional laws.'
For more than a century before the Bruen decision, Massachusetts had some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Like similar systems in New York, Hawaii, and several other states, designated licensing authorities had broad discretion to review applications. In Massachusetts, that power belonged to police chiefs, who assessed whether applicants would be a safety risk and asked applicants to demonstrate a 'good reason' to carry before deciding whether to grant a license.
But when the New York Pistol and Rifle Association challenged that state's licensing law, the US Supreme Court sided with the gun owners. In a 6-3 decision, the court found there is a constitutional right to carry a handgun outside the home — and set a high bar for when authorities can deny a license — invalidating gun laws in New York, Massachusetts, and other states.
State legislators on Beacon Hill quickly responded by modifying the law, removing the 'good reason' requirement but allowing police chiefs to deny licenses if they find 'reliable, articulable and credible information' that a person could be a public danger and is unsuitable to carry a gun.
'We are very committed to trying to protect that [law] as much as possible,' said Ruth Zakarian, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence. 'Local police departments know a lot about the people in their towns and municipalities. It's that local element and knowing the folks in your community that helps keep people safe.'
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But gun rights advocates saw an opportunity and pounced, filing a series of lawsuits challenging the state's interpretation of the new court ruling, as well as the state's age restrictions for gun owners,
'After Bruen, we have seen a torrent of lawsuits across the country challenging longstanding gun violence prevention laws,' said Billy Clark, senior litigation attorney with the San Francisco-based Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 'Massachusetts has been no exception.'
Second Amendment advocates in Massachusetts argue police chiefs still have too much power to decide the 'suitability' of who can and cannot carry a gun. GOAL said it has sponsored three lawsuits brought by gun owners whose licenses were denied, and another 12 cases have similarly reached the Superior Court level on their own. In several of those cases, District Court judges have agreed with gun owners, finding the 'suitability' standard that police chiefs continue to follow is unconstitutional.
The discretion that police chiefs have to deny licenses in Massachusetts is
'anathema to all of the most basic Constitutional norms,' wrote William Smith, a Princeton, Mass.-based Second Amendment attorney.
'Bruen warned that this right is no longer to be treated as a second-class one,' Smith wrote in an email. 'It shocks the conscience that it continues to be so treated.'
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Last May, Holyoke District Court Judge William Hadley ordered the city's Police Department to grant a license to a man it had deemed unsuitable because of years-old drug and domestic violence allegations. In August, a Boston Municipal Court judge cited Bruen and ordered Police Commissioner Michael Cox to grant a license to an East Boston man, who said he needed to carry a gun for his job at a security company but was denied because of a past report of suicidality. That case is now in Suffolk Superior Court, where Campbell's office has filed to defend the law.
And in July, a District Court judge ruled that Belchertown Police Chief Kevin Pacunas was 'arbitrary and capricious' when he denied a license to a man who allegedly fired his gun by accident in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant in Chicopee. The judge also found the state's licensing law unconstitutional.
All three of the District Court judges in those cases were nominated by Republican governors — two by Charlie Baker and one by Mitt Romney.
Dan Hagan, the Belchertown man's attorney, said his client was granted a license when he lived in South Hadley, but then denied one when he moved to Belchertown — an illustration of the law's vagueness, he said.
'Your constitutional rights are being determined town by town, chief by chief,' Hagan said. 'It's not based on objective standards.'
In one post-Bruen case to reach the state Supreme Judicial Court, the court ruled in March that
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'I still think there is a problem with the discretionary nature of suitability,' said Jason Guida, a Second Amendment lawyer representing a Boston gun owner currently challenging the license law in Superior Court. 'I understand the desire to preserve the status quo for public safety, but when you have a situation where you can make different decisions on the same fact pattern, that's a problem.'
Clark, of the Giffords Law Center, said the SJC examined Massachusetts gun law under the Bruen decision while deciding the New Hampshire case and correctly ruled that the state's licensing law was constitutional and set objective standards for applicants. Moreover, the law fits within both Massachusetts and the nation's history of trying to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, he said.
'That's a very basic and commonsense notion that I think most people would understand,' Clark said.
Wallace, GOAL's executive director, disagrees and is supporting the new series of challenges.
He said that while some gun advocates in Massachusetts celebrated after Bruen, he remained cynical that state officials would afford the Second Amendment its due respect. It would instead be a long, uphill fight, he predicted.
'Those of us who really knew our history said, 'Folks, we're just getting started,'' Wallace said.
Dan Glaun can be reached at